Finding Your Life Purpose Review (Part 1)

Recently I put up a poll on my LinkedIn about what I should post today. If you still haven’t, then go and follow me on LinkedIn so that you can decide what I post each week and you can also DM me there. Visit my profile here. Anyways, when I put up this poll, these were the results in 3 days time.

So as you can see most of you guys like Fictional Books more than non-fictions (screaming in excitement). You guys tied for “Finding the Best Career” and “The Famous Five Review”. Which meant that I had to decide between these two. Taking into consideration that most of you are students from high school or middle school (and also that “Finding The Best Career” is very easy to write because it is the summary of a 50-page book) I decided to write a post on the former topic.

The book that I found the most helpful for the topic “Finding the Best Career” is “Finding Your Life Purpose” By Mark Manson (One of my favourite writers). Unfortunately, even though this book is 50 pages, it has a lot of heavy content which won’t be possible for me to explain in just one post. Which means that I am going to divide it into two parts – The first one being all the things you need to take into consideration while choosing your life’s purpose and the second one is about the 7 strange questions which can help you find it.

With that being said…let’s begin with the actual summary (this is the longest intro in all my posts (but hey…such an important topic shouldn’t be taken lightly (I just did a bracket inside a bracket…woahh, that’s right, even I can do Rick Riordan Rip-off’s))).

The author starts with pointing out the differences between life choices in the past and present. He says that in the past it was simple – you either hunt or you plant. Life was short but simple. Nowadays we have so much to choose from, it does give us a lot of freedom but because of this many people wonder at the age of 80 about what they should have done in life. We feel that we our born for a higher purpose but actually it can be defined better this way:

We exist on this Earth for some undetermined period of time. During that time we do things. Some of these are important. Some of them are unimportant. And these important things give our lives meaning and happiness. The unimportant ones basically just kill time.

Mark Manson

This means that instead of sitting on the couch, eating dorritos and thinking about the cosmic significance of your life, (and yes…I am speaking to you, the person who is doing this exact same thing right now) you should actually ask the question: “What can I do with my time that is important?”.

All of us know that someday we are going to die, each and every choice of ours, each bite, each decision, all of it influences how we die. So what are you choosing to kill you? What most people don’t understand is that the best things in life can be ugly. Life is messy and all of us have our own unique flaws. You don’t get love without pain and you don’t get meaning without sacrifice. What people believe is that you need to find that ONE thing, that one purpose which once you find, everything falls into place. You will do that ‘thing’ till the day you die and always feel fulfilled and happy. If that is the case then why did Steve Jobs get fired from Apple after building it from scratch? Why did great freedom fighters in the history of Inda need to do a job to feed their family, even after finding their ‘purpose’?

Finding the passion and purpose in your life is a trial-by-fire process. You don’t do only that one thing constantly for your whole life. It’s a work-in-progress. You must try something, pay attention to how it feels, adjust and then try again. And even when you actually get it right, it is liable to change. Because you change. Nobody stays the same forever. Your nature may stay the same but never you. Doing what you love…is not always loving what you do. There’s a huge sacrifice to it. It’s not something that makes you happy, it’s something that you want to do even if you don’t like it. It’s something inevitable, like you don’t have any choive. Its our vehicle towards death and you’re happy to let it take you there.

Instead of asking “What do you want out of life?” which will get answers like – money, happiness, a good family, friends. You should ask “What pain do you want in your life?” which basically means What are you willing to struggle for? Everybody wants a good job but nobody wants to go through 60 hours of work every week. Consisting of boring paperwork, long commutes, sitting still in a cubicle. People want to be rich without the risk, without the sacrifice, without the delayed gratification and without the hard work. Happiness requires struggle. Period. Go to the gym instead of watching YouTube videos about how to get a killer body in a day. Everybody wants something but they aren’t aware of what they want.

Quite frequently we think about the result. That’s what we want but we don’t want to go through the process. When we think about our names in magazines and newspapers wearing a suit, looking smart, we want that. We want that badly. But wanting things badly, isn’t it. You need to struggle to achieve it. You need to go through failure to learn about success. And don’t feel bad if you don’t like the process. Don’t feel that you just don’t want to go through the struggles because you are weak. Understand that it isn’t in your hands. If you don’t like something, you don’t like it. It’s not because you are weak. It’s just because it is that way. Some things are for some people and some things aren’t. But you can actually use the result as a motivator. I want to become the CEO of Google. Before reading this book, I never thought about the hard process. But after reading this book I have understood that you need to plan out each and every step of the process before fantasizing and that’s what I am doing right now.

This summary consists of soooo many questions. This is why I am going to give you a week to think about all these questions. I will be back next week (bringing 7 more questions with me) with another interesting bag of knowledge for you to find out more about this concept of “Finding Your True Purpose”. You should read this book but if you don’t like strong language the I wouldn’t suggest that you read it. And if you are a kid then just wait for the next part to come up. Don’t read the book. Not for you, I will summarise it in a very good language appropriate for your age.

With that said, subscribe to my blog so that you can brag to your friends that you were the first ones to read the post (because you receive email notifications each time I post). Also comment down below if you have any questions or requests. You can also rate this article if you want (nobody cj=hecks the ratings). See you next saturday. Peace.